Maurice Wilkins

Maurice Wilkins (15 December 1916-5 October 2004) was a New Zealander-British physicist, molecular biologist, and winner of the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.

Biography
Maurice Wilkins was born in Pongaroa, New Zealand in 1916, and his family moved to Birmingham, England when he was six. He received a PhD from St. John's College, Cambridge in 1940, and he developed improved radar screens during World War II and worked in isotope separation for the Manhattan Project at UC Berkeley from 1944 to 1945. From 1948 to 1950, he made the first clear X-ray images of DNA, and, from 1951 to 1952, he and his co-worker Rosalind Franklin succeeded in making an even better image of DNA which was used by James B. Watson and Francis Crick to discover the double helix shape of DNA in 1953. Wilkins, Crick, and Watson were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of the double helix; Franklin had died of cancer before she could be nominated. He died in London in 2004 at the age of 87.